ALARM

Assessing Large Scale Risks for Biodiversity with Tested Methods

The ALARM consortium combines the expertise of over 68 partners from over 30 countries. ALARM encompasses 7 SMEs as full partners with central responsibilities. ALARM provides coherent scenarios of socio-economic, climate, land-use and other biodievrsity-relevant trends, exploring the framework conditions for biodiversity pressures. An innovative element of the ALARM prject is the combination of long term trend and short term shock scenarios, allowing a sensitivity analysis of currently predominating trend projections.

The main objectives of the ALARM project are:

To develop an integrated large scale risk assessment to biodiversity as well as terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems.

To focus on risks consequent on climate change, environmental chemicals, rates and extent of loss of pollinators and biological invasions in the context of current and future European land use patterns.

To develop a research network different environmental drivers and pressures and across different spatial and temporal scales of ecosystem and biodiversity changes.

To establish socio-economic risk indicators related to the drivers of biodiversity pressures as a tool to support long-term oriented mitigating policies and to monitor their implementation.

To achieve the objectives, ALARM consists of 3 major, methodologically defined work blocks:

Application of scientific methods for basic research (RTD activity)

Method tests and protocol development for applications (combined RTD/innovation activity)

Dissemination of Results and Toolkits (innovation activity)

Important outputs of ALARM:

Establishment of a European site network for ecological research

Atlas of climate change impacts on biodiversity

Assessment of parallel declines in pollinators and insect-pollinated plants in North-Western Europe

Database on pollinators of Europe

Quantification of importance of pollinators in changing landscapes for world crops